Design, Illustration, Programming

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Process: Black Night

It’s been about 2 months now since I’ve dived into going pure digital with my workflow, and even though I feel like I’m still getting used to drawing on my Cintiq, I think I’m starting to get a workflow down. The most immediate advantage for me at least, is the speed at which you can go from simple thumbnail to clean, useable line work.

For Enchanter I’ve just been jamming on the theme of different style knight characters, so I started out sketching with that in mind. Here I laid out the basic sketch of what I plan to draw. A simple 3/4 view of the knight with his cape draped over one shoulder. Once I had this draw, at a very small size, I simply enlarged it and dropped the opacity down so I could start roughing in the details.

Creating a new layer, you can see here the lines are a lot thinner since I reduced my brush size while drawing over the previous thumbnail, however I wasn’t feeling the proportions so I tweaked that on the fly. Not too tight, but not too loose either.

Now I have the lines tightened up on my third layer so I can see exactly the shapes I want to use. I had already planned on painting this from the start so I didn’t waste time trying to vary my line weight or complete 100% of the details. There are still some unfinished parts like the legs but I have enough of the overall shape to paint.

Finally I add color to the lines and merge the color/line layers before finishing the details, ending up with what you see below. This is about 80% there.Side by side of an earlier version and the current version.